by Colin Smith
Besides, surely the gentlemen had not been discussing anything of importance out there in the open, by the gate? Kress stomped out in a fury.
Von Papen asked to be excused. He had to join the marshal for dinner. He was almost at the door of Fast’s when he realised he was still holding the buckled spectacle frames. For the first time he examined them closely. On one of the arms was the name of a German firm which before the war had supplied hundreds of thousands of frames to opticians throughout Continental Europe.
For some reason, perhaps it was the small amount of gold in the alloy, von Papen was reluctant to throw them away. Once inside he put them in a desk drawer. He thought he might even produce them for von Falkenhayn’s amusement at dinner when he recounted the story. Young aides de camp were expected to amuse their generals. It was one of the reasons they were selected for the job – that and their ability to sit people in the right order of seniority at dinner, for many a promising ADC had lost his job for seating the wrong man below the salt. And it might be a good way of raising some of the points the colonel had been making. Von Papen had tried not to show it, but Kress had practically won him over as far as Yilderim was concerned.
3
Jerusalem: August 1917
***
Magnus feared no one save the Lord – except on Thursday. For then it was necessary to mediate with the Fallen One, even do his bidding. Anticipation was a torment. As the appointed hour approached his mouth became dry, his bowels liquefied, his testicles melted away to nothing.
Sometimes atonement was achieved through the medium of a small white rock by a certain olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane; or beneath a maroon prayer cushion in the white-walled Frankish church of St Anne’s; or in a gloomy niche in the collection of competing chapels that comprised the Holy Sepulchre, where his Calvinist core was nauseated by the corrupt smells of old candle wax and incense. He would go to these places, sit there motionless for a while, and then allow his hand to explore the underhang of a stone or beneath the pew cushion, or dart into the time-worn wound in the side of the Chapel of the Invention of the Cross.
When he did these things Magnus could never decide what he wanted the result to be. If nothing was there his relief was always tinged with disappointment. Yet if his hand emerged clutching English sovereigns and a small scroll of tightly-rolled paper he became even more agitated, as nervous as a thief. One sovereign was for him and the rest for the old Christ-killer he hurried the scroll to. Once it had been delivered his euphoria knew no bounds. He would be consumed by the Spirit of the Lord and quite often hear the secret language to which only he knew the proper responses. But until that moment, and especially when he walked the streets with the coins and the scroll on his person, he felt like a drowning man. And although passers-by assumed his eyes blazed with madness, they were also fuelled by fear.
The day after Maeltzer lost his best pair of reading spectacles Magnus sat with pounding heart by the stone in the Garden of Gethsemane. He waited for a while to see that no curious monk or shepherd was watching him and then slipped his hand under the rock. It was there: a plain white envelope containing the money and the scroll, which was always written on yellow paper. He took out one sovereign and put it in the little muslin bag he wore on a shoulder strap beneath his rags. The rest he stuffed in the one serviceable pocket of what had once been a dark blue waistcoat. Then he picked up the staff and strode out south-west along the Kidron Valley, so that he skirted the walls of the city and entered the Jewish quarter through the Zion Gate. Once Magnus looked back, but if anybody was following him they were making a good job of it.
***
After Magnus had made his delivery the old Jew, whose name was Levi Smolenskin, left the white envelope untouched on the table at which he sat. On the same table were three worn leatherbound volumes of rabbinical debate – two in German and one in Ladino, the language of the aristocratic Sephardic Jews from Spain. He had bartered the books from a neighbour. Smolenskin had always coveted these books, and now they were his for six round loaves, a sack of flour and two litres of olive oil. He could have afforded more but that would have been dangerously ostentatious. Even as they haggled he could see the unspoken question in his neighbour’s eyes – ‘How is it you have bread to spare for books?’
Smolenskin had been so conscious of that look that he had made up some tale about selling the last of his wife’s jewellery – as if she had ever owned a single bauble that would have raised a kopek in that starving city. His children’s resentment had been even plainer than his neighbour’s. They might eat, but there was never quite enough and the price of flour was going up all the time. Indeed, so obvious was their resentment that he had felt obliged to refer them to the Book of Deuteronomy: ‘Man doth not live by bread only.’ Did they really expect him to die hungry for the kind of fresh meat he only found in certain books?
He placed a hand on the envelope and moved it around the table a little before opening it. For a second or two, he weighed the coins in the palm of his right hand against the scroll of yellow paper in the other. Then he slipped the sovereigns into a leather purse which he returned to an inside pocket of his kaftan. He picked up the little scroll again and rolled it between his thumb and forefinger for a while, almost as if he was trying to work out what it was made of.
When he had tired of this he placed the scroll on the table and opened it out, keeping his hands on both ends to prevent it from rerolling itself. It was the same as always: line after line of what looked like utter gibberish.
When the Swedish mishugenner had first coming knocking at his door, asking in his bad German if he would say a prayer for him at the Wall and pressing the kvital and the money into his hands, Smolenskin did not try to discover why he had been chosen. He knew why he had been chosen. It was the answer to prayer. So what if the goyim could not lament the loss of a temple that was not theirs. Who cared? He and his children and his grandchildren were hungry, and here was money for bread and a little bit more besides. And what was wanted in return? Prayers – the kind of prayers that only a Jew could utter. What could be more fitting that a man who had devoted his whole life to unravelling the essential mysteries should be rewarded thus? If the Lord had seen fit to pick a well-known lunatic as His chosen instrument then that was His business. That the Almighty should single out Smolenskin for special treatment was, he thought, only a mystery for those who did not have proper knowledge of Levi Smolenskin.
At first he had not opened the kvitals. Nor had he thought it all that strange that the Swede should insist that his prayer be lodged between particular stones towards the right-hand side of the Wall. Why not? Madmen were allowed their obsessions. Especially if they paid in gold for them.
Then, about three months after Magnus’s first visit, he could not get to that part of the Wall because it was already occupied, so he wedged the Swede’s kvital into a more central crevice. What did it matter? If the Lord was disposed to accept a goy’s prayer from the Wall, one stone was surely as good as another. Besides, how would Magnus ever know?
Two days later the Swede was at the front door again. He had opened it himself to find the mishugenner standing there, his huge fist gripping his ridiculous staff, glaring at him with those baleful blue eyes that reminded him of the Siamese cats that rich shiksas walked around the central park in Odessa. Without waiting to be invited in, Magnus had pushed his way past him and demanded to know where ‘the paper’ was.
At first Smolenskin was so taken aback he did not understand the question. When he did understand he was terrified. How on earth had this madman found out that he hadn’t put it in the usual spot? Surely he had not been able to check it out? In the daylight hours outside curfew there were normally enough Jewish men around to stop a lunatic goy getting close to the sacred stones. To his astonishment the Swede demanded that he must go to the Wall immediately, put the kvital where it was supposed to be, and never put it anywhere else again. At first Smolenskin had demurred, but Magnus was in
sistent. The Jew had never known him quite so lucid. ‘It is necessary to make this right,’ he kept repeating. ‘It is necessary.’
In the end, Smolenskin had picked up his tellith, the fringed prayer shawl, and the leather tefillin boxes containing fragments of the holy writ which he tied by their attached thongs to his arm and around his forehead, and without another word had set off for the Wall. The Swede had followed at a not very discreet distance, so that whenever Smolenskin paused in his stride the tap-tap of Magnus’s staff on the flagstones had threatened to catch up with him.
What the old man had dreaded most was that when he got to the Wall he would find that the elder employed to collect spent kvitals for burial in an urn (for no holy writ, however humble, could be destroyed) had already removed the Swede’s yellow paper. But it was still there and he was able to put it in the required position while Magnus squatted a few metres away nonchalantly scratching at his bug bites.
It was while Magnus was scratching himself that Levi Smolenskin, standing with his bobbing back to him, had opened the scroll for the first time. In fact, it had begun to unravel slightly as it emerged from its niche and his curiosity was sufficiently aroused to want to see what the Swede considered so important. It was utter gibberish, a meaningless jumble of letters in no known language, the madman’s ridiculous tongues transposed to paper. Except that on second glance there was a certain rationale about the script, for each ‘word’, written in tiny capitals using a fine pointed pen and black ink, was exactly five letters long.
It was at that moment, that Smolenskin concluded that he might have become ensnared in a chillingly secular affair. He had, he decided bitterly, wallowed in his so-called blessing with all the stupidity of an animal being fattened for the larder. And yet even now he could not decide whether the papers he had been taking to the Wall at least once a month for the last two years were coded messages or just another indication of the Swede’s dementia: a cipher meant for God.
But there was also the matter of money. Since his first visit he had received exactly thirty-seven sovereigns from Magnus. A small fortune! Could it be the Swede’s own money? Was he really, as some maintained, the son of a Stockholm lumber king? Or was someone giving him money to ensure that the yellow kvital – almost every other kvital was written on white paper – was put in the right place, and that for Levi Smolenskin it would be a task worth doing without question any time he was required to?
If that was the case, he reflected, Magnus was an ideal go-between. Who would suspect messages passed from a religious maniac to a half-starved old Jew? Who would suppose they were anything more than part of Magnus’s relentless haranguing of the Almighty?
And yet if they were not, what were they?
For Smolenskin this was the most painful question of all, because the answer was very plain: if the kvitals were not of Magnus’s ravings, then they must be coded communications of a kind somebody did not want to send through the mail or by telegraph. In this case the most likely explanation was that they were messages between British agents, who were using the Wall as a kind of post-box. Smolenskin went cold at the thought of it, and he thought of it often.
Like most of the Orthodox in the city he was apolitical. A world war was far too earthly an occurrence for men who would hardly look up from their books if their beards caught fire. Only when the conflict impinged on himself, his family and his community – the drying up of Hanukkah donations from the United States, for instance – did Smolenskin really take an interest.
But if anything he was pro-Turk, for the same reason that Zionists like the red-headed Dr Rosenblum, whose views on everything else he detested, were pro-Turk. Turkey was fighting Russia and Russia was the enemy of all Jewry. Besides, it was Turkey which had allowed him into Palestine and permitted him to stay despite the fact that, technically at least, he was still a Russian citizen and therefore an enemy alien.
For this reason Smolenskin could never be an ingrate like those Zionists who sought salvation through the English, people like that Lithuanian heretic Elizer Perlman who insisted on calling himself Ben Yehuda or ‘son of Judaea’, and was obsessed with the blasphemy of turning the language of the Prophets into everyday speech. One of the high points of Smolenskin’s time in Jerusalem had been his participation in the ceremony at which the black candles were lit, the shofar blown thrice and the profane Perlman expelled from the faith! A fanatic! A true fanatic! It was said that his poor children could hardly communicate because they were forbidden to speak any other language but their father’s home-grown Hebrew. Well, he was in America now and no loss! Those were the sort of shameless riff-raff who supported the English – heretics, freethinkers, atheists, Zionists like Aaronsohn who thought the Jews could farm the land, men who impudently demanded the redemption of Israel before the return of the Messiah.
But despite his gratitude two things had stopped Smolenskin going to the authorities with his suspicions. One was the capriciousness of the Turks: they were quite likely to thank him for the information and then hang him along with the rest just to be on the safe side. The Germans were almost as bad. They occasionally had members of the Orthodox community brought in for questioning, and it was quite obvious that files were kept on people like himself who had arrived from Russia just before the start of hostilities. His last interrogation by the Germans had been conducted by a tall, thin, sick-looking major who had begun by reciting the names of every one of his children and grandchildren living with him. Smolenskin had found it most disconcerting.
The other reason for not going to the authorities was that, even if they took a sane and lenient view of matters, and after due investigation it turned out that his suspicions were unfounded, it would almost certainly stop the money. Magnus would find another Jew to send his prayers from the Wall. It was, after all, just possible that the Swede did have some rich relative who indulged his maddest whim.
Once Smolenskin had tried to question him about it. ‘Where does this money come from?’ he had asked.
‘From the Fallen One – he sends it to you.’
‘The Fallen One? Do you mean Lucifer? The Devil?’
Magnus had nodded.
‘But I thought you were on God’s side?’
Magnus had nodded again. ‘It is a trick,’ he said.
Smolenskin, sensing that the conversation was in danger of getting theological, had decided to concentrate on the more practical side. ‘And where do you meet him?’
‘Many places. Secret places. Sometimes he is under a stone.’
The Swede has worn his usual solemn expression, his right hand carelessly knotting his beard. And Smolenskin had looked into those clear blue eyes and wondered whether it was madness that he saw there or the cunning of a master dissembler.
On a couple of occasions he had lingered around the Wall after depositing his kvital, convinced that it would not be long before he saw some other mourner remove the yellow paper. Yet although he never took his eyes from the hands of the men who wept and prayed at that spot he never saw it happen.
Often he had promised that he would come back a few hours later but once home he invariably persuaded himself that the chances of seeing the kvital being removed were too slim to be worth the effort. Sometimes it was gone the next day; sometimes it might be there for three or four days before it disappeared. Smolenskin did not like to ask how often the old kvitals were removed for fear of drawing attention to his regular contribution.
Besides, there were mysteries that should not be explored. Ignorance could be construed as innocence. Not that they would believe him of course. He looked again at the groups of five letters on the yellow paper. XEIOB YOZBU LTOPQ. He sighed. Did they mean anything at all?
4
Caesarea: September 1917
***
In the evenings now there was just the faintest hint that summer might one day end. Instead of the same blanket heat, nightfall brought a welcome cooling that seemed to heighten the chatter of the cicadas like a rumour
running through a crowd. The Moudir of Caesarea heard the insects’ rattling chorus as he watched the melting sun on the horizon and waited for his flock to return, a bag of feed corn at his feet.
He stood on the jetty, his fat hands clasped behind his back, staring into the sunset for that first telltale shadow that would tell him that his children had almost completed their circuit of land and sea and were coming home. Though cruel the Moudir was a sensitive man, and the poetry of the evening might have moved him if it were not for two smudges of smoke on the horizon some miles apart. The Entente had increased their naval patrols recently, and there were indications that they might be thinking of trying to land troops north of Gaza and cut the line of communications between the front and the railhead at Deir Sineid.
Only a few days earlier sentries down at Wadi Hesi had actually exchanged rifle fire with British sailors rowing about in a whaler not half a mile from the shore line. The boat had been lowered from a monitor and, as they got closer, the sailors were seen to be measuring the shallows with a plumb-line as if they were charting a passage for landing barges. The authorities had taken the event quite seriously and had announced their intention to move Jews and other foreigners away from the coast. They had already begun to confiscate the firearms they had been permitted to keep as a protection against bandits. Not a moment too soon, thought the Moudir. Earlier in the month, on the sixth, some British agents had actually managed to blow up the huge ammunition dump at Haida Pasha on the Syrian-Turkish border. Jews or Armenians, almost certainly. The ingrates!
The Moudir bent down and picked up the sack of grain. He had just seen the little shadow in the sun that heralded their arrival and he began to scatter the seeds on the jetty. When he had finished he looked up. They were much closer, the white ones were in the lead as usual. As they came in the Moudir greeted them with more grain, throwing it at some of them a few feet off the ground so that their final approach became unbalanced by greed and they staggered out of the air. Some fed from his palm and the braver, more insolent birds were soon perched on his forearms and shoulders. They cooed and he replied with his traditional endearments. ‘Come on my pretties, come on my little beauties, come on you greedy little monsters. Come on Nur, come on Fatima, come on –’